The Pomp Podcast - #644 Understanding Bitcoin and Blockchains with Nic Carter

Episode Date: August 27, 2021

Nic Carter is a Partner at Castle Island Ventures and a Co-Founder of CoinMetrics. In this conversation, we discuss bitcoin, mining, Ethereum, smart contract platforms, Castle Island Ventures, Coinmetrics, geo-political issues, and then we roll the FUD dice.  ======================= Gemini is a leading regulated cryptocurrency exchange, wallet, and custodian that makes it simple and secure to buy, sell, store, and earn bitcoin, ether, and over 40 other cryptocurrencies. Offering industry-leading security, insurance and uptime, Gemini is the go-to trusted platform for beginner and sophisticated investors alike. Open a free account in under 3 minutes at gemini.com/pomp and get $20 of bitcoin after you trade $100 or more within 30 days. ======================= With 10M+ users, Crypto.com is the easiest place to buy, and sell 100+ cryptocurrencies. The Crypto.com Visa Card gives you up to 8% back instantly, and 100% back on Spotify and Netflix. Also, Crypto.com lets you earn up to 8.5% p.a. on BTC, and 14% p.a. on stablecoins. Get $25 when you download the Crypto.com App with code "pomp". Download the App now: https://crypto.onelink.me/J9Lg/pomppodcast2021 =======================

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Nick Carter is a partner at Castle Island Ventures and a co-founder of CoinMetrics. In this conversation, we discuss Bitcoin, mining, Ethereum, smart contract platforms, Castle Island Ventures, CoinMetrics, geopolitical issues, and then we roll the flood dice. I really enjoyed this conversation with Nick, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is Gemini.

Gemini is a leading regulated cryptocurrency exchange, wallet, and custodian that makes it simple and secure to buy, sell, store, and earn Bitcoin, Ether, and over 40 other cryptocurrencies. They offer industry-leading security, insurance, and uptime. Gemini is the go-to trusted platform for beginner and sophisticated investors alike. You can open a free account in under three minutes at Gemini.com and get $20 of Bitcoin if you trade $100 or more within the first 30 days. Again, open a free account in under three minutes at Gemini.com and get $20 of Bitcoin after you trade your first $100 or more within 30 days.

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Not only do they have a great username and URL, but also that is the place where mass adoption is occurring. All right, let's get in this episode with Nick. I hope you guys enjoyed this one. Anthony Pompliano runs POMP Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of POMP Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right. Can we just get the news out of the way so everyone knows?

Oh, yeah. I moved to Miami. Let's go! Mick Carter is now... Is that breaking news? nobody knew this before this is the worldwide premiere on the best business show that's why people will tune in exclusive uh is nick carter is now a miami resident he is living in brickwell scoot over a little bit so you can uh get in the thing there we'll help you there i mean look if you're gonna make big news like that we gotta make sure i'm still getting used to live tv

so uh nick is now a resident of miami um let's well first of all why did you move to miami let's start there there's a constellations of reasons um the number one reason though has to be tone at the top governance you know i moved from massachusetts and massachusetts despite having a vibrant crypto industry after all our fund is based there um has a very antagonistic relationship from a policymaker perspective with crypto. Unfortunately, Elizabeth Warren, Senator, is not a fan. My local representative in Massachusetts, Stephen Lynch, also not a fan. Contrast that with Miami, with Florida.

You have the mayor, Suarez, here, who's an enormous supporter. And that stuff makes a difference to me. And I'm a highly mobile person. I can live at, you know, everything is remote for me. Fund, startup, everything completely remote. And so, you know, that to me is the number one thing. I just want to live somewhere where, as a capitalist, as a crypto person, I'm embraced and supported by the local policymakers.

And honestly, that was a big part of the decision. When did you make the decision? Probably around six months ago. Yeah. So you knew that you were going to do this for a while. Yeah. It took me a while to sort of actually effectuate it. But I'm here now.

This is like day three already. I'm on local TV studio, Pump TV. you guys sucked me in here i am all right uh bitcoin right now is very interesting place you uh i was telling my brothers were like the voice of reason throughout all of the esg mining china ban of mining uh pretty much any time that somebody in the mainstream media said something stupid it was like i gotta go write another rebuttal and you were just cranking them out how do you evaluate where we are right now with mining specifically honestly i think we're in an extremely good place as far as mining is concerned. A lot of people were upset with Musk, myself

included, for what he had to say about Bitcoin mining. But for better or for worse, his comments catalyzed a reaction among the mining community, specifically in Bitcoin. And we've seen this enormous reaction to create nonprofits, associations, just groups of individuals that are engaging in disclosure regarding what kind of energy they're using. We've also seen the exogenous shock, which was the Chinese hash rate migration. We couldn't plan for that, but that just so happened to have enormously positive effects for the mining space. And I think in the space of a year, the Bitcoin mining industry has gone from this completely

opaque, sort of unaccountable, largely Chinese industry mined with significant amounts of coal to almost a strongly North American industry. I mean, not exclusively, but by the end of the year, I wouldn't be surprised to see 50% of hash rate in the US or Canada. That wouldn't shock me at all. Right now, it's probably 30%, 40%. And that hash rate is much more transparent about its operations. Not only that, these miners increasingly publicly traded. We're seeing new listings all the time. We're seeing SPACs, IPOs all the time for these miners. The SEC has made it clear they consider ESG to be, you know, an important part of US capital markets, again, for better or for worse, the miners are responding to that. And they're seeking out these renewable

sources of energy, not just, you know, to appease, you know, critics in the press or anything like that, but also because that's actually what shareholders are looking for. And so there's just all these pressures that are pushing mining in sort of like really favorable direction. When you think of the mining moving to the U.S., I agree with you. I don't know exact numbers. It's going to be 45, 50, 55 percent, whatever. It's going to be much more than it is today, right? Let's say in North America.

Are there downsides to that? Like we would always point and say, oh, all this hash rate in China, that's bad. I think a lot of people, one, would point to centralization in a geographic region and then two, to the authoritarian type government and, you know, unpredictable. We don't know what they're going to do. if we bring it to the North America and still have, let's say, majority, are we as concerned or no, because the government ideally is a little bit different in terms of democratic rule and a little bit more predictable? Well, there's just no risk that the government in the U.S. goes berserk

and attacks the property rights of miners. We have a patchwork, a federal system where the states make policy with regards to mining. So you're not going to get a homogenous policy unless there's some, you know, significant legislative change or something like that. But that, you know, there's a process associated with that. So the U.S. is just not going to have this institutional environment where mining is prohibited overnight or nationalized. You know, that was something I was always concerned about with China. It's just a less sort of fragile system here. It's, you know, you're just going to get more heterogeneity in terms of policy. Of course, if the US becomes the by far the dominant hub, the question then can validly be posed, is this actually an improvement over mining, you know, being largely concentrated in China? But, you know, I think, again, I would just look to the states, the states are the ones that generally make policy around mining. So we have, you know, we don't have one US policy for mining, we have like 50 policies.

What's your take on ESG, OFAC compliant blocks, like all of what I'll call potentially virtue signaling attempts that were made by miners versus the things that actually could be highly impactful? Do you have a framework as to like, hey, here's the things that we should be focused on that actually make a difference versus the things that sound good but aren't? Or do you think we still need the free market to kind of play this out before we have answers? Well, there's a number of things miners can do to sort of improve their optics. um you know one is procuring renewable energy obviously uh two would be buying renewed

renewable energy credits um you know i i you know i don't think anybody should be mandating that but that exists as an option if miners want to decarbonize right and you know some miners are taking advantage of that um you know i i don't strictly want all mining to be like lit and transparent and um you know accountable to the state like i think it's important and a lot of good Bitcoin has been making this point, we need a balance of, you know, off grid mining, that's like, a little harder to triangulate. And then, you know, some large industrial miners that will be, you know, much more transparent. Because if every, you know, every hash derived from a publicly traded corporation, they would be kind of exposed to, you know, those political wins.

And we don't necessarily want that for Bitcoin. So, you know, I think long term where this is going to settle is you're going to have some large mining conglomerates that are publicly traded and are pretty transparent, clear about all their energy, things like that. And maybe even have these policies about block filtering, although we've seen, I think Marathon was the one that proposed that. They moved away from that after a lot of critique. But I think it's important we have this ecosystem of sort of cowboy, you know, wildcat miners that are sort of off grid and that aren't you know necessarily traded on public markets aren't as exposed to the state yeah one of the things that um came up in that marathon i think was kind of in the crossfire of this was

they want to do these ofact blocks uh they thought that there was going to be some premium uh assigned to the bitcoin that came out of those blocks versus let's say other bitcoin it sounds like the institutional market put no premium from an economic standpoint on the bitcoin uh we talked yesterday to adam back and one of the questions i asked him was like what if some of the satoshi coins moved would people put a premium on those coins as like a historical artifact right or some level of importance and really what it's getting at is like forget ofac forget satoshi like will we ever see premium assigned to coins or do you think that we do have like true fungibility where uh it's a nice theoretical we're just never going to see it in the economics it's a great question

it's one of those big debates you know i actually go back and forth on whether virgin coins exist and are demanded by the market um i initially thought they might be a thing and then i sort of reversed myself and now i've talked to a few miners to tell me actually there are like people out there that ask for virgin coins are they willing to pay more or we're not sure yet it's not clear to me it's not clear to me i've just heard whispers that actually there there is some demand for virgin coins uh but you know the catch is whenever you mine a block there's fees right And the fees are not newly created like the issuance, the Coinbase output is. The fees are deriving from the transaction.

So you're processing the block. So the fees taint, you know, if you have this idea of, you know, existing coins being full of taint, the fees would introduce taint into the miner Coinbase and they're all mingled together, right? There's no distinction in the protocol between fees and issuance from the miner's perspective. So you would have to forsake all the fees in a block if you wanted a truly virginal coin. And as the miner revenue becomes more fee-dominated, you're not going to want to eliminate that fee revenue. So the prospects for virgin coins, I think, are really, really challenging.

Do we know what the percentage breakdown in a block is right now? Between true mining in the block versus the transactions? Around 5% fees and everything else is issuance. It's pretty low right now. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's low, but it's higher than I think some people understand it to be. Right. I think a lot of people think it's, you know, basis points, but it's 5%. It's been up to kind of 20% for certain periods historically. And, you know, as the issuance drops off and in theory, as block space becomes a more of a valuable commodity, fees are eventually going to become 100% under revenue. Talk to me about the Lightning Network, Liquid, these like side chains or second layers. Like how do you view where we are with the development of that type of infrastructure?

And is this something where like now we're starting to see, okay, this is real, this is working, and we can kind of see substance behind the excitement? Or do you think we still have a long way to go to get to the point where you could be like, all right, this is going to work? Well, when we raised our first fund in 2018, we looked at Lightning. We thought to ourselves, is it investable? At that time, we figured that it would be really challenging to invest in Lightning because it just hadn't really reached a stage of maturity

where we saw developers able to hack on it and build really interesting experiences in a short period of time. The infrastructure, the plumbing was just challenging. As of today, it's a little different. We backed a bunch of Lightning startups. Lightning, to me, looks to be reaching a state of maturity where it's actually usable, not just for microtransactions or streaming payments,

but for other kind of like Web3 use cases where it's sort of this novel sort of internet architecture, not even strictly for payments. And so like Lightning Network as of today is kind of, I think, reaching actually an inflection point. And if you look at the value locked on Lightning, it's had this inflection as well. And I don't know exactly what to ascribe that to,

but uh the network itself is is is uh you know i'm seeing a vast proliferation in the in the sort of set of use cases that we see on it today yeah and speaking you're talking about like the wildcat miners those that are kind of off-grid no one really knows about but they're still able to uh you know participate it seems like all of the public metrics with the public nodes that's gone parabolic but we have to remember that there's also kind of these wildcat nodes right that are basically out there that we don't have an understanding how big they are how much capacities there etc yeah and you don't necessarily want the entire payments network to be transparent i mean payment trend uh opacity is a pretty important feature of a functioning system so

um it's you know it's kind of funny because you know obviously i love on-chain data and blockchain analytics but you do have to surrender some of that um as these networks become you know more second layer and more private for those that don't know talk to me about castle island talk to about coin metrics kind of what is the investment thesis and then any progress on coin metrics so castle island we've been around for about three years uh we're still boston based uh we've grown the firm recently actually i'm the only member down in miami so i will be our miami attache um you know partly you just need a yacht joe's got three yachts he told us today so you're i'll land you one that's what i'm talking about so we've been doing more deals in latin america

and well actually we have three portfolio companies here in miami right now so um you know that wasn't the case six months ago so um there's an interesting like crypto nexus here as you guys are undoubtedly aware um but you know our general thesis is financial infrastructure is our bread and butter that's what we know best as it pertains to public blockchains we're in co-investors and number of startups um and that's that's what we do effectively and we've been broadening our scope recently. We've been looking into alternative internet topologies, less censorable internet architecture, social media, things like that. And so, you know, things that are adjacent to public blockchains. But the main thing we do is financial infrastructure on public blockchains, making the

asset class something that could actually extend to, you know, billions of people. I think everyone knows you and Keshan for what I'll call it the Bitcoin investments, right? Those the ones that most people know they're the ones they've seen you talk about etc what is like the most extreme on the other end outside like i i think uh we were laughing this morning at the supreme being uh uh controversy all this stuff like when you think about the portfolio what percent is bitcoin versus like other things it doesn't have to be other blockchains doesn't have to be other coins but just like anything else that isn't bitcoin only yeah i mean we we have a handful of uh explicitly bitcoin only startups in our portfolio you know casa and

River would be good examples and the lightning startups. But generally, we've taken the position that we're not going to dictate to the entrepreneurs, to the founders, which protocol to use. And many of them, if not most of them, are cross protocol. And whether it's using stable coins, using smart contract platform, a lot of these are sort of brokerages, exchanges, custodians.

For those kind of business models, going to want to support what the market is you know telling you is important uh and so they'll be cross protocol uh and so we're not uh handing down you know these dictates in terms of oh you you absolutely have to use this or that um from the perspective of vc you just have to be i think more of a more open-minded about protocols i wrote a piece recently i talked about like monetary maximalism and then basically like technology competition and i think this is kind of what what you're getting at which is there's almost uh in money a lack of technological superiority like the u.s dollar system is not necessarily the most technologically advanced but it has the

social consensus like we all agree that it has value we use it etc and so you arrive at like some level of maximalism in a single currency where you're paid you save you invest in that pay your taxes whatever but the technology maximalism is almost historically has never worked right whether it's ios uh whether it would be python whether it would be any of this stuff like there is going to be this market where nft is like a good example i think where like people started out on one blockchain and then some people split off and said hey we're going to go do it on a dedicated use case specific blockchain some people said hey we're going to go do it on a layer two some said hey we're going to go on another smart contract platform like it just

feels like it got very fragmented very quickly as people pursued what ultimately was like a technological you know feature yeah it's so interesting to see you're right nfts were first issued on Bitcoin. And then, you know, then you had more growth on Ethereum. And then now it's fragmented across blockchains like Flow, these all twos on top of Ethereum, Tezos, other smart contracts. You know, virtually any blockchain can incorporate NFTs because you're basically just creating a serial code that, you know, references some external data. And so now I think you're going to have NFT platforms that are cross-chain, just straddling a bunch of blockchains. And, you know maybe even from the user's perspective you won't know where it's uh you know where the

registry is where you know does it matter like this is one of the big questions i think is everyone talks about decentralization like i think of the world as people think of bitcoin crypto blockchain whatever you want to call this industry uh as bitcoin was where it originated so decentralization was the most important thing it was put out there as being incredibly important peer-to-peer electronic cash etc now with like let's take ethereum there was okay we're gonna add this composability we're gonna like make it better all this stuff but then like binance smart chain came out of nowhere which is like oh we're just gonna get fully centralized like we're gonna go for efficiency low cost high throughput like who cares and not everyone moved but like some people

moved and then you start to see this with other blockchains etc and you almost get to the point of like how important is decentralization in some of these systems versus they should just pursue the efficient kind of hierarchical structure that allows for high throughput low fees and like decentralization doesn't really matter to the use case yeah i remember uh larry sukonik wrote this uh a good friend of mine wrote this great piece years ago about uh platform grade decentralization sovereign grade decentralization if i'm remembering and he couched in terms of your adversary so if your adversary is the state which is the case with money you know we're competing with fedwire and the dollar system when it comes to a base monetary asset um you know decentralization is

all important when it comes to creating a new architecture for exchanging uh you know maybe more trivial digital value or something that references outside concepts so something that's not fully endogenous um you know like nfts for instance you know the most popular platforms we're seeing, like Flow is, you know, an NFT specific platform, certainly makes decentralization trade offs, like running a node is much more difficult. I think a lot of people kind of took the Bitcoin ideology in terms of cheap node operation, and tried to extend it to other novel blockchains, without realizing that these blockchains weren't pursuing the same goals, bitcoin remotely um and it doesn't necessarily make them invalid um it just means that they're

attempting something which is uh just radically different uh in terms of its goals um i that said i think there's a lot of fragility in some of these blockchains that have very expensive nodes because expensive nodes means few nodes few nodes means you're exposed to any kind of legal challenge uh potentially political uh difficulties like i'm not going to call any blockchains out uh but uh you won't yeah one interesting thing is at coin metrics we've run you know like i don't know dozens of blockchains so i periodically ask my engineers i'm like which nodes are the hardest to run and they're like oh this one and that one and this one and that one and like we can't get them online or like they're falling over all the time to me that like that's information

the market probably isn't internalizing it just expresses itself in the form of fragility and it builds up and it builds up and then eventually something catastrophic happens where we learn that you know there's only seven nodes and you have the all-in-one data center on one jurisdiction or something like that we haven't really seen those validator level failures yet although blockchains do stop all the time it's just people don't notice it they'll seize up and halt and you have to get restarted that doesn't really get reported uh so i would caution people that for some of these really aggressive smart contract blockchains where they're pushing tons of data through the system um some of these failures are likely to emerge at some point i want to kind of

go through the ecosystem a little bit and ask you about certain things and then we'll play a dice for a little bit but um ethereum has this new uh update right in terms of the monetary policy and the burning mechanism etc what is your understanding or kind of read as to positive negative are you neutral how do you think this affects ethereum moving forward so i got completely savage day one on twitter when i talked about eip 1559 actually increasing fee levels apparently that was uh something that had been forecasted so uh people didn't like that i i pointed that out um but uh my was it right uh yeah yeah so like fees on ethereum are like i would say structurally higher now and really what eip 1559 did was cut out the floor in terms of fees so um when you know

you'd have periods on ethereum of downtime where it would get pretty cheap to transact uh the new eip kind of just eliminated that and set a like a higher threshold minimum threshold to sort of transact i'm vastly oversimplifying uh but generally my read is that um it's sort of consistently like pretty pricey to transact um of course you got you know the ethereum community got this great thing in return which is burning a significant share of all the fees that you know would be paid to miners miners are making as much revenue now as they were before and also So I think a majority of those fees are being burned. So think about what that means from a user perspective.

So that's good and bad. On the one hand, you can make this argument, hey, if we actually reduce the issuance, Ethereum can become deflationary from a monetary perspective. It's a great story to tell investors. The negative thing, and this is something I try to communicate, and I'm trying to be fair and balanced here, is it's a form of rent extraction, right? So initially, the miners, all of the fees were going to pay miners for their service of keeping the block space linear and, you know, doing the thing that miners do. Now, you know, a good portion of the fees associated with using Ethereum just go to effectively juicing the price of Ethereum, right, by, you know, potentially reducing the supply.

And so that really benefits token holders at the expense of users of the blockchain. Now, a lot of Ethereums will say to me, like, oh, well, token holders are users, so it's all the same thing. But if you expect Ethereum to mature and you have a lot of firms that hold Ethereum just for working capital perspective, just to utilize the blockchain, transact on it without wanting to have financial exposure to Ether, those firms are going to feel disempowered because you know the ethereum governance process increased the costs of using ethereum and funneled that sort of return into the token price and so now what you have thanks to the cip is like these two groups

these stakeholder groups are at odds with each other you know people that are long-term uh you know effectively speculators not to use that pejoratively on the token price and then people and i think this is the most important demographic that you want to sort of uh curry favor with you want to sort of coddle them is the people that use and hold ethereum as working capital but that latter group is a little disempowered by the change in my view so that's uh you know i'm certainly not known to be like you know deeply part of the ethereum community so this wasn't received very well when i said it when you think about this because it's an interesting um um framework that you're using where token holders can see price go up which people on twitter etc

like they love that idea right so they're going to applaud you for for that thought process but you're basically saying yes but the people who are using this this may actually be a negative impact and so is it fair to say that your analysis is this could be short-term good because price goes up but actually long-term sustainability over a 10-year period or something could put more stress or kind of be bigger obstacles or more complexity moving forward because of the change? Yeah, I think there could well be a reckoning where people begin to understand that these somewhat opaque governance processes are not being, you know, they're not necessarily weighing the interests of all stakeholders equally. And there could well be a moment where people realize,

wow we turned up the rent extraction dial too high and we got to turn it back now i think that's completely plausible i don't think people are really ready to hear that message maybe fees need to be really high for a long time and these other smart contract competitors start to do really really well which we've seen that's happened in the last week or so just you know appreciating relative to ethereum uh but yeah i think there could be a reckoning over the unanticipated impacts of tweaking things that look like technical things but they're actually political changes so my view of this has been i want to see if you want to agree or disagree and then two also like how you think this will plan moving forward is uh there was bitcoin people tried to do things with

it they were unhappy with the technical kind of architecture and how easy it would be they went and they built ethereum uh for the all intensive purposes they were able to accomplish the composability that they were looking for that led to defy many of these other things um but then then they started to hit kind of a limiting wall and so flow you know is one example but you've also had the binance smart chains of the world you've got things like solana etc that are now starting to pop up and it almost feels like to some degree uh there's a lot more technical competition among the smart contract platforms let's say bitcoin and something else that's competing from a monetary standpoint and so if that is true and you can agree or disagree with

it is this something where the old like what is myspace what is facebook what is the next social network whatever that is more likely to play out along the smart contract technical competition like landscape not claiming any one of them is any one of those companies you know equivalent but just saying like there is going to be ones that find success there's going to be ones that disrupt there's always going to be new challengers and like you're going to constantly have to iterate and innovate your way to stay at the front of the pack to hold both the one the economic holders but also to the users of the platform because it seems like bitcoin is it either works or it doesn't but no one's really competing for that like decentralized programmatic you know

monetary policy etc and so it's kind of a one or zero here it doesn't feel that way when you talk about the smart contract platforms yeah i mean i don't remotely think of these things in terms of the analogies to uh social networks um i you know if you think about the key decisions that are made whether it's changes to bitcoin i mean the block size change as i said with the ip1559 these look like technical changes but really they are pertaining to governance and they pertain to you know who are the winners and losers in the system who are the entities that can extract rent from being proximate to the protocol and who are the entities that are being effectively harvested by the protocol elites not to you know kind of engage in fear-mongering or anything but

That is at the core of any real major change that happens in any blockchain is who are we empowering by virtue of our changes to the protocol and who are we disempowering? And oftentimes developers don't acknowledge that they're engaged in politics. They think they're engaged in engineering, but it's politics because there's billions of dollars on the line. How much are they influenced, in your opinion, by the non-engineering community? So whether it's people on Twitter, whether it's large asset managers, whether it's folks like taking the Ethereum system consensus, if you look at Solana, FTX and that crowd, like how much of it's coming from the people who aren't actually writing the code versus do you think these are technical decisions that are being made by the engineers and they just have ramifications in the political analysis? Well, it's hard to quantify. I mean, it depends on the blockchain, but you have this tyranny of

structurelessness, right? Where in a non-formalized system, which is the governance of most blockchains, it's not formalized. Power still exists. It's just veiled. It's opaque. So it's not clear who has power. And then in a highly technocratic system, it's a lot of engineers that, you know, take up this role as you know policymakers people that can actually influence the governance of the system i would say that's what i mostly perceive is these like backdoor um you know pretty opaque like pretty hard to understand as a regular person uh you know settings where decisions are made and uh you know it's largely technocrats aka you know effectively very technical uh engineers that are making political decisions um of course you do occasionally have you know

influence uh and and it's getting more blurred now as you have more interest groups and you know more large corporates that try and inject themselves into you know these governance conversations uh like you know the new york agreement things like that uh and you also have more sponsorship of core devs which muddies the waters but i'd say you know like historically it's largely technocratic and also hard for an outsider to sort of get a handle on when you think about other areas you guys are interested in so you've got kind of the bitcoin or monetary uh analysis uh you've got smart contract platforms and kind of public blockchains are you guys doing anything in nfts that's all that you sold an nft to von miller by accident

yeah that was such a funny story tell us a story real quick and then talk nft so i you know like a year ago i complained on twitter that no one ever sends me uh nice comfy startup t-shirts like i i think i have 50 t-shirts from startups i'm sure you guys do too and uh open c uh sent me a t-shirt and they sent me a card with a t-shirt and a card had a you know it was clearly a private key scribbled on it and i i took one look at it i you know put it into metamask i'm like wow this is the ugliest nft i've ever seen it was like um you know a bunch of lines like red and green and white lines didn't really make any sense to me i'm like what is this not it was like it was not i appreciated the gesture and it was

it was a great t-shirt um but i thought it was total like a totally weird nft and so i forgot about it actually i put on my fridge um and then a year later i got a dm from dan at open c he's like neck the floor price on this thing's like eight eath i'm like what what do you mean he's like the nft i sent you like you need you need to sell that and i'm like okay uh and i go back on open c and like sure enough my like ugly nft is like i think it was a color glyph and it is trading these things were trading like eight to ten eath and you know it was like 25 grand and uh and so i like listed it and you know then uh i saw that um someone on open c with the name von miller bought it i'm like well that's obviously not von miller from yeah and i'm like you know

i'm a fan of von miller like great player i'm like there's no way he's speculating on nfts and then under his own name his account on OpenSea tagging his own name the next day my friend sends me an Instagram post from the Von Miller where he's bragging about the NFTs that he bought and yours isn't there

mine is the fifth one and he's proud of this NFT and like I've immensely conflicted feelings about this because now the floor price on these things is like three times higher it's like very material it's like 20 ETH now because von bought it and everyone's okay i gotta get my hands on one of these

so i basically should not have sold it to him i should have just sat on my freaking nft um but yeah i do have the honor of having sold an nft to von miller every startup that's ever sent me a t-shirt and didn't send me a nft that's not worth seventy five thousand dollars or whatever it is uh we're gonna have a conversation now yeah this is officially my favorite ever no question i should have worn it today how how sustainable is all this right so we see the crypto punks it seems like that's like entered into this like social status game that people are playing uh no different than why somebody buys an expensive car or watch or whatever um the ether rocks somehow now have like entered that realm as well do you buy the argument that like it's literally just people

trying to prove who's cooler who's richer who's whatever uh or is there some other fundamental value like how do you evaluate all this i mean people have always played these status games and there's always someone out there that thinks the objects of status are tacky you know like um we might think uh lamborghinis are tacky um i certainly wouldn't buy one um so there's always and in crypto you know like the crypto culture is very idiosyncratic and like pretty unique so i can understand why outsiders find these status objects in the crypto space tacky but you can't argue with the fact that crypto punks other nfts have crossed the chasm in terms of being objects of status other like mainstream celebrities odell beckham i think has one uh did jay-z

jay-z changed his profile picture and so what it is is just like you know like gold is recognizable because of its physical properties you know it's so that's why people wear gold jewelry to demonstrate wealth and status that was the og version of this a crypto punk if you know if include it in your avi on twitter you're demonstrating status in a in a way that's relatively easy to prove i mean of course you could fake it but people would sort of figure out that you didn't actually own a crypto punk if you you know if there's one industry where they're going to figure it out it's cryptic yeah like someone's going to be the detective and figure it out so and also you can wear fake jewelry too you know so you know other other instruments of

status are not um you know like they can be compromised too so um there's no question now that um owning digital artifacts and using as a way to prove wealth and status is here to stay no question i don't know what the you know next exciting vintage is going to be uh but uh some of these things probably look like they're staying power would you guys ever invest in those types of assets forget which one but like do you see that as an investment opportunity from a fund that is focused on investing in the industry or is it too speculative and you're more focused like the public blockchains financial infrastructure i don't know if i have an edge there i mean i can in fact i can assure you i do not i don't know man you were selling to fond miller that's my one

trade maybe we're going to keep it a one trade all time um but yeah if we were collectibles focused funders which those totally do exist and i know funds that are bespoke nft trading funds i'm sure they've done well uh we would but you know we have a mandate and that's what we do all right last question i want to ask you and then these guys probably have questions is uh axi affinity is this like play to earn things two billion dollars people are asking in the comments in terms of um how do you think about play to earn is this new is it just a new variation with digital technologies is that something that you all are looking at as like a sector do you have opinions on axi affinity itself yeah i mean we haven't invested directly in uh block well

actually we have invested uh in in uh blockchain like collectible card trading games things like that. We've also done some analytics, an analytics platform, but we haven't really done anything like an Axie Infinity. I think what you want to do is interrogate where the cash flows are coming from. So, you know, the earning, like who are you being paid by? Where is that cash flow? What's the origin of that cash flow? And as far as I understand it, in Axie, it seems to be folks that are buying the tokens in order to participate in the system. So, you know, this isn't me trashing it, but it looks somewhat circular in many ways. And so the reflexivity is good on the way up, but it's also devastating on the way down. So I would just try and audit where the injection

of capital into the system is coming, and does it require the continuous entrant of new players for those cash flows to work? I think people are modeling them maybe as if permanent growth as possible. But of course, it's not in a finite world. So that's the question that I would sort of like pose of that system. When you evaluate a system like that, what would classify as healthy origin of cash flow versus like non-healthy? Healthy would be a situation where users are just organically paying, you know, injecting capital in the system in a sustainable way, like, you know, to buy skins or to buy, you know, pay to win is like the most common mobile model. unhealthy would be this requires continuous growth for the cash flows to actually be stable

and i don't necessarily know enough about axi to you know answer that question yeah it um it's one of these things too where i think uh that one specifically seems to have struck a chord and i gotta call it the bias of uh the delphi digital guys were trying to get me to go and you know they found it like a penny or whatever right and they were uh incredibly uh right about the future economic appreciation of it and then they told me again like a dollar and then again like five dollars and now it's you know whatever 70 80 bucks whatever it is and uh the whole time i was just asking myself yes you can keep earning which i understand but like there's like this social component to it and with social not from like you and i are going to communicate in the game

but there's like social implications so like one side of that conversation is like this is amazing people who might have been driving it for uber or actually just didn't have money and were poor etc and some of these developing nations can now with an internet connection create economic you know uh kind of prosperity for themselves or security and all that that's the positive side the negative side is like does that mean they're now like addicted to like they have to play every day all day long right and they can't have like another life i don't know where it settles out but it just feels like everyone is focused on like the economic side and like we get in this weird like are we gonna get to ready player one is that like where we go i mean there's like kind

of weird vibes around the um scholar system is that what it's called an axi where you buy the assets and then you lease them out to people typically in the developing world to play the game and you know to me that seems like kind of like a sharecropper style relationship And so I'm waiting for the hit pieces to drop in the media about it. I haven't seen any, but it's very fertile ground for people to accuse crypto of being neocolonial, you know, so maybe now that I've said it, someone's going to write that. And they're going to quote you as well, like Nick Carter said. I'm the best business.

All right. What questions do you two guys got? Mine would just be around regulatory stuff, right? So we've seen as the market for digital assets and Bitcoin specifically has continued to grow, it's obvious that it's becoming more on the radar of politicians, whether it's Elizabeth Warren, Ted Cruz now on one on another side and all these other people. Is this just like kind of the price you have to pay for playing the game of getting bigger and growing and all this stuff? And how do you see that trending over time? Like, does it become more of a topic, not just in the infrastructure bill, but all these other kind of facets? Yeah, I'm concerned about it.

I'm worried, really, that Bitcoin and crypto generally will become a partisan issue. We've already seen the origins of that. I mean, if you just tally up the senators and representatives that are overly pro-Bitcoin and the ones that are against Bitcoin, you're seeing party lines develop. And that's not strictly good. I mean, I want to be part of the biggest possible tent. I don't want to appeal to just 40% of America. And it would be a big shame if it got highly politicized.

you know bitcoin itself is a neutral apolitical system but of course in its collision with the world uh different uh political camps will have different reactions to it um i mean i like that we kind of showed some of our muscle as this bill came through the senate in the house even though we lost in the end looks like we're gonna lose uh there will be other opportunities to change the language regarding brokers and things like that but yeah i'm concerned i don't know exactly how to alleviate the partisan lens that is falling over the industry and are you surprised because like so from my standpoint uh elizabeth warren was one that was outspoken kind of against it and said some super coders and all this kind of stuff right so to me she's a person that would uh i would

assume would believe in kind of the infinite uh innovation in the technology did it surprise you a little bit that these party lines started to draw in the sides that people took honestly uh Not so much. So I wrote an editorial today in Coindesk talking about the OnlyFans ban or the proposed OnlyFans shift in direction, which they later reversed. And I was making the point that it traces back to this program called Operation Chokepoint, whereby the government effectively instructed banks to deplatform certain genres of commercial activity. Sex workers was one, and that's why they've had such a hard time with payment processing historically. And a lot of it was stuff like, you know, firearms sales and gun manufacturing, things like that.

So there is a school of thought out there. And, you know, this is present in Congress, in Treasury, that government should politicize payment rails so that they can promote policy through banks. And so Warren's view, as far as I can understand it, has to do with increasing, you know, pursuing a progressive agenda through you know through payment rails through banks and bitcoin is anathema to that right so even if she's nominally against you know concentrated power and banking things like that she's for state oversight into what kind of transactions you can make and you know that's i think very deeply unfortunate uh but that means i think it's

very unlikely would ever you know get her on our side gotcha john what do you think with that yeah Yeah, so I'm going to ask you about Castle Island Ventures. Can you just talk about, I know you just did your second fundraiser, I think, this year. Can you just talk about what the process of fundraising was, what companies you've looked at, and how you kind of look at vetting them? Yeah, I mean, fundraising is, and Anthony, you'll know this, I mean, it's very regime context dependent. like um in the good times it's easiest thing in the world and then in the bad times which there are plenty of it's like the absolute worst most draining impossible task um and because our industry fluctuates so much it's hard to time a fundraise such that you know it's hard to like

nail the timing like you're always going to be going through some sort of awful six months where you can't raise and then you have an amazing three months where it's the easiest thing ever And we're begging you. Yeah, it's, you know, how it is. So we were, you know, lucky, I guess, with the timing, you know, it worked out. We raised our second fund, $50 million fund, closed it earlier this year. Our investment thesis is largely the same, I would say. In terms of evaluating startups, a lot of it has to do with founder market fit.

You know, does the founder's experience, you know, pertain to the market or the protocol? You know, you say founder protocol fit even. Does it pertain to the opportunity they're pursuing? We value crypto nativeness very highly, of course, just because there's something about crypto natives that really matters in this industry. Team is probably the biggest consideration for us. But then, of course, market sizing. and uh yeah i would say we're like maybe more valuation sensitive than your your typical crypto firm which i guess um i've regretted that in a lot of contexts where we should have overpaid

um for a startup but um you know we've kind of stuck to our guns a lot of the time um and um you know we've tried to be reasonably uh sensitive to valuation so that's maybe what uh sets us apart from some other funds yeah it's interesting to see people's like different um different thought processes about like different startups and it sounds like you go mainly after the founders and the team and uh what market they're going after yeah and and you know we have like the when we started there weren't actually that many uh equity focused venture funds in the crypto space there are a lot of token focused ones and we decided we understand equity best from a governance perspective and um it was under deployed and then also we felt that um a fund

bridging traditional financial systems the financial services industry and the crypto space that needed to exist and uh there's a lot of great funds that did that as part of that strategy but that was sort of the bulk of our strategy uh and so we're you know think about like within crypto like we're a specialist within a specialist space already so we're about as kind of niche as it gets we have the fud dice uh one can people buy these online uh yeah i think on uh my merch shop on the brink.shop so on the brink.shop i think we have like 200 pairs left so by the way the fact that when you move these came with you is exactly what uh what i would expect from you i brought a box a whole box because you know i knew that not everyone had them yet all right you you have

to do the honors you roll the way that these work for those that don't know is uh each dice die i guess die has on uh the interface or the face of it uh a different piece of fud so everything from inefficient government ban nsa to unfair what else is on here quantum satoshi returns there's some good ones helps china what is on the bottom helps china that one's obsolete yeah all right so give give us a roll and let's see what else see what we get here this is the fourth edition it's in bitcoin orange well it's not quite bitcoin orange my uh my dice manufacturers actually had some sort of snafu uh with i love that you have in this space in this space you You can have a meme dealer, you can have a dice manufacturer.

We had supply chain issues, I don't know if you've heard about those yet. We had the exact right shade of orange and then they're like, sorry, we tried and the batch failed. And like how a dice batch fails, I don't know. So anyway, if it's not quite the right orange, please don't hold it against me. Let's roll. oh that's my funds logo that is uh oh quantum that's my favorite one of my favorite fuds all right what what is the fud around quantum the quantum fud is that uh quantum computing will

just destroy bitcoin because elliptical curve digital signature algorithm or i guess we snore signatures now uh will be broken by uh quantum computing and uh everyone's funds will be you know freely uh you know thievable i guess um and that's the fud there's two pieces to this i think one is there a true quantum computer yet not to the level that would be required to break ecdsa okay so but in theory we have quantum computers that have accomplished some very limited tasks okay and the second thing would be if somebody did have the computational power and complexity to break it would that destroy the value of bitcoin like if i broke the bitcoin algorithm and then just took all the bitcoin isn't it unvaluable so i basically just took something

that has no value yeah i think it's um the quantum fud involves this classic reasoning mistake where you um you you confuse the um structure of bitcoin for the substance of bitcoin basically uh and so the theory is that if you break uh or render inoperable feature of the system the system itself dies but that's not true what bitcoin is really is a list of who owns what or what addresses can unencumbered you know do valid spends that list can obviously survive anything because and and it can survive a change in the signature algorithm so if ecdsa fails you know we're swapping it out already with schnor um if all of these signature algorithms fail um we have a technical challenge ahead of us but the bitcoin blockchain does not disappear um there i've seen

proposals for moving to quantum resistant signatures which do exist they're just space inefficient so it's a you know there's an engineering challenge there um but there's also uh shot 256 i believe is not quantum vulnerable um so um uh it actually there's an interesting debate about the fraction of bitcoins that are quantum seizable um the early address formats did not involve hashing the address later address formats do so um hash addresses are less or not quantum vulnerable as far as i understand it that's kind of like a detail that doesn't matter Really, what I've understood from talking to cryptographers is we're probably decades off from, you know, quantum computing threatening Bitcoin. Second of all, quantum breaks are gradual, not sudden.

So we will have plenty of forewarning. And then third of all, you know, there are signature algorithms we could use if it came to that. It just feels like this is like such like a lazy intellectual argument because majority of people can't articulate what you're articulating in terms of the technical architecture. they're just like i heard quantum computers are really complex and powerful and of course they're just going to break it well it's just that you know we're not really that good at predicting technological progress in the future you know like tech predictions 20 years out tend to be wrong so should we abandon the technology that works today based on a theoretical future technology that sort of invalidates this technology i don't think so yeah you know let's use what works now

john you get a roll next let's go we're all gonna roll one time then we're gonna finish up that was a horrible roll we got energy waste the classic yeah the classic um yeah bitcoin uh waste energy that's the critique the the best energy statistic that i found this year was that uh elizabeth warren was saying uh Bitcoin energy usage is more than some countries, right? A couple of people saying that. Okay, great. Yeah, okay, fine.

So I went and I looked at what else is more than some countries and Christmas lights. And so I said, we should cancel Christmas because Christmas lights consume more energy in the United States than some countries consume all year long. There's a war on Christmas. All of a sudden it didn't matter. All of a sudden that was not a great critique, right? There's so many industries you can find. And I believe the industry for the extraction of zinc actually accounts for more energy than Bitcoin.

But I've never heard anyone complain about that. Maybe because zinc is useful in sunscreen or whatever. I'm not a big fan of sunscreen, but we can leave that aside. Well, you better get used to it here in Miami. I don't care how tan you are, you got to make sure you got some sunscreen. Do you think that when people bring this up, is it better to attack the argument or, I guess, defend, debate, whatever, from a no, it's actually not that bad from an energy consumption standpoint? Or is it that's not really worth the conversation? It's more so the energy usage is for a positive impact or like a good reason, right?

Like people feel like they got to punch back at the energy consumption amount, but it almost feels like the better argument is like zinc is useful. therefore people consume power to do it bitcoin is useful therefore it's going to consume power correct absolutely spot on so there's a lot of clarifying to do around the nature of the energy grid which is a concept that most people do not understand and i would say having looked into it now for a long time it's probably you know on a par with or deeper than bitcoin in terms of its complexity so you are our energy grid expert by the way well like not really i'd say you know like i think you need a phd to like truly understand it but the more i dig into it the more complex it is so the notion of stranded or wasted energy or transmission losses people just

aren't aware of this and so because they lack you know some of that basic knowledge they're not really very well situated to you know understand bitcoins energy consumption which is very unique and very idiosyncratic right so there's a factual side of the debate which is important but as you say the most important thing to do is just remind people of the utility of bitcoin because no one complains about the aluminum extraction industry or um you know steel like you know they understand that it's used to build skyscrapers no one complains about ac which is used far far far more energy than bitcoin um or even you know tumble dryers and washing machines modern conveniences everyone benefits from these things no one complains about them with bitcoin not

everyone benefits from it um especially not westerners you know that sort of lack an appreciation for why you would want a system like this why do you want an independent system of property rights outside the state outside the banking system uh and so you know it kind of goes to the like the globe that you have behind you um if you look globally where bitcoin is most adopted on a per capita basis it's not the us it's like chain analysis had good data on this that just came out last week it's um on a per capita basis it's vietnam india pakistan nigeria kenya venezuela colombia ghana um you know southeast asia eastern europe ukraine russia latin america those are actually the most popular places um people aren't aware of this but you know

we're looking at 150 million people worldwide that are sort of crypto users now um that is a very different perspective than you know elite westerners that are elites that um are the main voices in the energy debate and if anything it's kind of like this sort of like you know like very anglocentric perspective to say well who needs a sound money system uh when we have the dollar right well you know over a billion people worldwide live um and i think alex gladstein says this live in 20 uh double digit inflation right um and you know most people worldwide do not have access to functioning capital markets for savings that's for sure um and you know you know know many many hundreds of millions of people worldwide do not have access to functional

banking systems so it's about communicating the global nature of this and what people are using it for that is the energy debate is actually it's a utility debate it's crazy to me that uh so many people have the privilege right now cloud scene's been all over this i think you and a number of other people but it really is just the system that we have works good enough and we were talking earlier about like mobile banking in African countries, leapfrogged the U.S., definitely in Asia, they leapfrogged us. And it was just because we kind of had this legacy technology. And so you're almost better off coming at it from scratch because you're able to understand, one, why is it powerful? But two, that is your entry into the financial services. And so, again, I just go back

to like Elizabeth Warren's probably the perfect example. Last decade, two decades, she spent like railing on Wall Street about accountability and transparency. And then like a system comes along that literally every single transaction is on a public ledger and she's you know yelling and screaming about it and it's like i understand why and you know it's a rational position for her to take and other politicians but it does feel a little bit like hey this is the system that you always wanted it just is uh not wrapped in the kind of box that you would expect it to come from yeah i mean if you design the financial system from scratch today would it look anything like financial system we have of course not yeah joe my turn let's go inflexible oh inflexible is a good

one so let's go nice roll yeah good roll as if joe wrote the diet right i rolled it yeah i guess i can't congratulate myself on writing so this is one that economists like to say so um if you compare bitcoin and gold when the price of gold goes up a lot um the supply of gold the rate of increase of supply of gold goes up new mines come online yep i promise we'll get to the point here um and you know they produce more gold and so there's a supply response which attenuates the price impact and it's the same on the downside when the price of gold goes down a lot um there's less gold mined And so the downside volatility is less. Now, Bitcoin is perfectly inelastic from a supply perspective.

The supply doesn't care what the price is ever at all. And a lot of economists say, well, that's actually kind of a nice feature that gold has, where you have this supply response that actually smooths out the volatility a little bit. With Bitcoin, all demand changes are expressed purely in price. you know you know with of course the exception of the havings we can debate the importance of those um maybe on another episode but so that's the critique the having wasn't priced then go ahead go ahead second episode on that um so this is like an educated this is a critique you

might hear from like an economist the like a smart economist that doesn't just dismiss bitcoin entirely like a steve hank uh or whatever well he's uh i don't know if he goes to that level of sophistication with this critique i think actually the only thing that uh nick and i have ever disagreed on is having priced in or not that's probably it yeah right we're still at odds on that yeah all right let's rather than me roll we let's do three minutes what what is your argument for why it is priced in um just that uh market participants are generally aware of the supply schedule and you know that information should in theory be expressed in the price so that's that's my view so i agree that that is theoretically what should happen

bitcoin specifically is unique in that one it's not like a like of a stock right was to say hey in two weeks we're going to issue these shares people would have to learn about it have to internalize what that meant and then act in that two week period right so they're kind of don't have like a i know how many blocks until the next having today right so i've got four years to kind of prepare three years whatever uh so that is a positive for the argument of it being priced in where i disagree is that i actually don't think 50 of people who hold bitcoin could describe to you how the having works that's fair that's fair so there is an argument to be made regarding the sophistication of investors, or if you're a sort of marginal investor, my response would be what

actually matters is not your average investor, but the price setting investor, you know, the enemies that set the price. And so your opinion in the market is weighted by, you know, by the amount of capital you have, you know, the market cares about your opinion to the extent that you're large um market participant uh and so you know i would probably discount the expertise or lack thereof of like the smallest holders so the other thing that i think about a lot is and i'm putting in the chat right now for everyone who's listening uh the on the brink dot shop where you can go get the dice yeah he's gonna run out in a second uh the the other thing i think about is when the having a curse there's more media attention obviously as more media attention some people

say hey i should go buy bitcoin whatever and the additional user who joins heard about bitcoin recently probably doesn't understand it and it is bringing additional demand that previously wasn't priced into the market all around that event and so naturally you just can't have it priced in i think the argument would be if people have seen it three four times and they know that that's gonna happen then i guess they could price in that way but it just feels like there's too many it's too complex for it to be fully priced in and i think if you zoom out it's just like well 18 months later the price is way higher so is it always something other than the having or is it have some impact right or and would you argue that maybe that is the pricing in yeah so like my view

is that like bitcoin is generally a function of the price is a function of demand side characteristics as opposed to supply side and the demand is a function of popular adoption so it could be that we're basically describing the same thing but with different language um where you know the world gradually discovers the utility of bitcoin and as they discover it they adopt it and one of the things that is the utility is the supply schedule yeah and so that could be one way to sort of harmonize our views i will say that uh there's not many things in bitcoin that can be said by two people who are both pro bitcoin that could create massive uh bifurcation of the community if you were to tweet the having was not or the having was priced in and i tweet the having was

not priced in we'll both have both sides screaming at us that we're right and wrong and so it just feels like one of those topics where it's impossible to prove or disprove but uh people have really strong opinions about it i think in theory you should be able to assess the the veracity of of the claim uh from just by looking at the data uh and and treating it like a um you know natural experiment looking at a bunch of halvings on a different coins i don't know if anyone's done that analysis um but you could uh do an event study probably on other blockchains yeah yeah but you know i guess you know some people would say it doesn't hold on other blockchains the bitcoin specific thing so then it's more difficult because i'm only like three

data points i will say one thing about the bitcoin community it has forced me to be a much much much clearer thinker because basically when you know that you're going to say something the first thing i think of now is okay what are all the ways that some you know idiot on the internet is going to come and attack me and the idiot could be pro bitcoin or not pro bitcoin but like there's always a reply guy there's always whatever and it does in some weird way force you to think more clearly and kind of more thoroughly before you say stuff. Yeah, I mean, my best critics for my writing are like anonymous accounts

on Twitter. And so I think about them when I write, like, am I going to enrage them? Joe and John run two of them and they're actually salvaging me lately. I'm laughing because I'm on thebrink.shop and he has a mug that says the price,

the having was priced in. So you can go, you can buy that. supplies last supplies last the having was priced and that's my favorite mug that is that is pretty good i like the wizard are we gonna get in a uh are we gonna get in a dueling uh a dueling uh e-commerce shop do we need a mug that says the having was priced in you're giving us a lot of free promotion maybe i'll have you on my show and then we'll do your e-commerce shop this this is not uh in the store though uh it's not so we're probably gonna add it maybe depends if you guys like it you're my alpha testers yeah we like it uh but you know it's my three favorite things

bitcoin usa and camo so what a pitch put them all together all right it's cool everyone we appreciate you guys tuning in today uh where can we send people to find you on the internet twitter number one place nick underscore underscore carter that's two underscores